Paul Burton took the opera seriously, almost religiously, and as he strolled in the foyer during an entr’acte, his annoyance grew.  Was there no place where one could enjoy the art of fellow-artists without having one’s spirit jarred out of all receptiveness?

Then he remembered the high perches of the less-fashionable devotees.  He had never been up there, but he had heard that the occupants of these upper galleries frowned on noise and even refrained from applause, drinking in the music as though it were too sacred a thing to treat as a mere evening’s entertainment.  Following a momentary whim, he went out to the box-office and bought a fresh ticket.  Holding it in his hand, he mounted above the parterre boxes and the grand-tier boxes, to the highest and cheapest of the galleries where silence and an almost awed concentration reigned.  And there, when the lights came on again, he saw a slender figure in a chair near him, leaning forward with her chin resting on her hand, in an absolute fervor of interest.  It was Miss Terroll and again she was alone.  Once more she impressed him as someone purring with pleasure, and when the performance ended he found himself on the sidewalk whimsically waiting for her to come down from her dollar seat, among the gallery gods.

When he caught sight of her, she was slipping as quietly and unobtrusively through the crowds of jewelled and fur-wrapped women and men in evening-dress as though she were a mouse vanishing from a hall of banqueting, to which she had surreptitiously crept for her crumb.  She did not look at the people about her.  She did not seem to see them, for her eyes were still languorous with memories of Tristan and Isolde.  As Paul touched her arm, she started and he hastened to say:  “My car is here.  Won’t you let me drive you down-town?”

She let him lead her to his machine and lay back dreamily against the cushions, as they shot down the avenue between twin threads of electric opals.

For a while they talked of the opera, of the music and the voices, and the musician found himself expanding with a warmth of appreciative contentment, because he had a companion whose understanding and enthusiasm kept step with his own, and a step like that of a classic dance, attuned to harmonies.

He found himself often coming with a sort of start to the realization of a discovery under whose influence he tingled.  Theoretically he knew that in this city, in whose varying meeting places of extremes the unexpected was to be expected, one should never be astonished.  He knew there were artists who shunned Bohemia, and once he had met a barber whose enthusiasms were all for cuneiform inscriptions.  He had heard in a club of a hobo whose nails were clean, whose address was elegant and who had confounded surgeons on surgery, artists on art, poets on verse and theologues on theology.  He knew that the circles which had soothed his artistic snobbery with an admiration as